Paul Kalkbrenner releases ‘Back to the Future’ mixtape

German icon Paul Kalkbrenner has released the first installation in a three part mixtape series exploring dance music classics. The mixtape is an emphatically personal endeavor for the producer, tracing his dance music roots back to his pre-teen years sitting around a radio with friends.

In a statement, Kalkbrenner discussed the significance of the Back To The Future Pt. 1 saying:

“Over Christmas 2014, I needed a break from recording my album,” he writes. “Searching online for a song I recalled from my youth, I fell into a rabbit hole of thousands of YouTube playlists and posts, rediscovering the songs my friends and I would gather and listen to as 12 & 13 year olds every Saturday in East Berlin on Radio DT64 (now Berlin’s Radio Fritz).”

“I stumbled Back To The Future,” he continues, “collecting over 5000 songs on YouTube, learning for the first time the artists behind the songs we heard almost 25 years ago. The forthcoming trilogy is the result of 18 months of building edits from YouTube recordings and stitching them together off-line. I could not include every song, nor indeed even the entire tracks from this small period until 1993, so this is my personal history of electronic music arriving in Berlin.”

Kalkbrenner has maintained that the mix series will never be for sale, but is instead meant for sharing with friends and was largely a labor of love. The tracklist is a who’s who of vintage dance with offerings from DHS, Aphex Twin, Todd Terry, and even Fingers Inc.